Busy times ahead for Fort Morgan Streets Department

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Fort Morgan Streets Superintendent Jim "JW" Willis shows the Fort Morgan City Council the plastic striping material that is applied to the road with heat, instead of the traditional paint, during a department showcase tour May 6, 2014.

Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times

Two Fort Morgan Streets Department workers apply crack seal to the pavement on the 100 block of East Beaver Avenue across from City Park in June 2017.

The Fort Morgan Streets Department is responsible for maintaining all 54 miles of streets within the city. With traffic control, maintaining storm sewers, handling post-storm clean up and patching streets, it’s safe to say the streets department workers have their hands full.

Jim “JW” Willis has been serving as the superintendent of the Fort Morgan Streets Department for 24 years. He oversees the department and manages the projects, which range from maintaining the current streets to coming up with new ideas.

“Over the past 24 years, most of our responsibilities have stayed the same,” he said. “The biggest change we’ve come across is that the town of Fort Morgan has gotten bigger.”

And he was talking about both the population and the city’s physical size and amount of roadway, with at least a couple new roads or longer stretches of existing roads — including Education Avenue by the new middle school and the now-connected Acoma Avenue — that were completed in recent years.

The streets department has also taken on the responsibility of ensuring all of the crosswalks comply with the American Disabilities Act (ADA), which allows disabled citizens to use sidewalks more effectively.

“We adjust the crosswalks every time we do any major street rebuilds, ensuring that we work pro-actively so disabled citizens can use our sidewalks,” Willis said.

In recent years, the Fort Morgan City Council sought more information about the actual state of city streets after hearing from residents how concerned they were about that. A pavement analysis commissioned by the city and completed in 2016 showed that the majority of Fort Morgan’s roads were in far worse shape than thought and would require annual expenditures of over $2 million to even make a dent in the maintenance backlog and eventually get all of the streets in good shape.

Last November, Fort Morgan voters approved increasing city sales tax by 1 percent, with all of the new funding going toward streets improvement projects. That is expected to nearly triple the budget of the streets department.

The previous annual budget to repair streets was around $950,000, and the current year’s budget is over $2.6 million due to the sales tax increase and related revenue projections.

“We really needed the budget increase,” Willis said. “We’re so happy to get it, and now it’s time for us to get to work. We’re ready to get our streets updated.”

“I think things are looking really bright,” the streets superintendent said when asked about the future of his department. “With this budget increase coming in, we’re planning on having every street touched either with seal coat or rebuild within the next 10 to 12 years.”

That would be a huge difference from what had been even considered possible in previous years.

“The way we’re building streets now, we’re building for the future,” Willis said. “We’re putting down a good down a good solid base, and putting in a thick layer of asphalt.”

He also said he hopes that the streets department will have to do much less work with maintaining the streets as technology and innovation improves the way roadways are built in the modern world.

“The people who come in after me and the future workers of the streets department will hopefully only have to rotomill off a few inches of asphalt to put the streets back to normal condition,” Willis explained. “They’ll be able to do three times as much as we do now.”